Define useful feature. It seems to me if the APIs are old it is because there are newer more useful ways of doing things, rendering the old stuff useless. I'm sure the Antique shops think most of their merchandise is useful, but that's simply not the case for the overwhelming majority. You like to think you have a good grip on what's useful, but I am sorry to have to break it to you, you don't.
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Broken APIs ... Has Mountain Lion broken something AGAIN?!
- Thread starter coolspot18
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Define useful feature. It seems to me if the APIs are old it is because there are newer more useful ways of doing things, rendering the old stuff useless. I'm sure the Antique shops think most of their merchandise is useful, but that's simply not the case for the overwhelming majority. You like to think you have a good grip on what's useful, but I am sorry to have to break it to you, you don't.
First off you don't get to decide what responsibilities any manufacturer has. If Apple broke the law and its contract to you, then they have might failed their responsibilities to you, otherwise they owe you nothing more. Second, Lion did make it clear that Rosetta was being discontinued, if you upgraded and only became aware of the fact after your purchase, that demonstrates you were an improperly informed consumer.
Don't like the price and product? Don't buy it. I simply don't understand the complaint here. For my part, I love just about every aspect of ML and look forward to it. I also welcome all the added updates that I'll likely received. The 20$ is well worth it.
Great for Windows. In general I'm not a fan of forced obsolescence, and I do think Apple can do better on that score, but it is all-things-considered an extremely minor complaint, and even I have the ability to appreciate that in the long-run, it may just help, ever so slightly, move technological progress along at a greater pace.
Exactly. Let's put and keep things in perspective. Forced obsolescence is a nuisance, nothing more. But with the way some people go on about here, you'd think it is a bloody travesty. That doesn't strike me as an adequate well-reasoned and measured response. It's just as bothersome and useless as the Apple fanboi's lack of critical and objective abilities.
It's not an extremely minor complaint John that non 2010-2012 macs run much faster on windows than they do on os x. And it's not a minor thing that my out of the box lion mini from 4 months ago runs better on sl than on lion.
I don't like the price but I ll buy it because they need to fix some bugs of lion and ml is the service pack I need to pay up for. Because they sure as heck won't be fixing for example the smb bugs in lion in their infinite wisdom. I am buying it because I really want to get a better system than the travesty that is lion, although I am afraid since by all accounts they 've done very little core work that ml won't be any faster than lion. Remember though John that after the vista debacle ms issued a system that was almost twice as fast and required close to half of the resources than vista did. I don't see anywhere apple optimizing their os so it's actually any faster than lion, all I see is that ios gets the next darwin kernel and os x doesn't and that support for older macs and os x versions is dropped along the way.
Apple on the other hand are rushing ml to make some minimal fixes to lion's poor development while also pushing airplay to sell more apple tvs, chinese to sell more iphones to the chinese, and notes and reminders to sell more ios devices in general. That's not much of a new os really, we are not that naive. Certainly not one that would qualify for around 400 mil to 700 mil in development costs.
My point was that with a minimum of 400 mil they are going to be making out of this in profit, they could do a bit more developing and a bit less bs-ing about adding notes, reminders, facebook and twitter.
I don't like the price but I ll buy it because they need to fix some bugs of lion and ml is the service pack I need to pay up for. Because they sure as heck won't be fixing for example the smb bugs in lion in their infinite wisdom. I am buying it because I really want to get a better system than the travesty that is lion, although I am afraid since by all accounts they 've done very little core work that ml won't be any faster than lion. Remember though John that after the vista debacle ms issued a system that was almost twice as fast and required close to half of the resources than vista did. I don't see anywhere apple optimizing their os so it's actually any faster than lion, all I see is that ios gets the next darwin kernel and os x doesn't and that support for older macs and os x versions is dropped along the way.
Apple on the other hand are rushing ml to make some minimal fixes to lion's poor development while also pushing airplay to sell more apple tvs, chinese to sell more iphones to the chinese, and notes and reminders to sell more ios devices in general. That's not much of a new os really, we are not that naive. Certainly not one that would qualify for around 400 mil to 700 mil in development costs.
My point was that with a minimum of 400 mil they are going to be making out of this in profit, they could do a bit more developing and a bit less bs-ing about adding notes, reminders, facebook and twitter.
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Let me give an example about "antiques".
Breaking compatibility with the most common open source/freeware ntfs layers so you can't access an ntfs drive and you are forced to pay and extra $20 for this on a third party solution. Yeah sure, why use ntfs formatted drives anyway, it's not as if people have a windows computer at work and an ntfs external drive and they need to transfer files back and forth. Let me give an example about "antiques".
Agreed, this is annoying, but again I don't think it is a prevalent issue. Besides MacFuse works on Lion. If it doesn't work in ML is that because the project might have been abandoned or is it an intrinsic problem? It seems to me the issue here is with the third-parties not Apple. A quick google search indicates there is hope that OS X Fuse will work on Mountain Lion, maybe not on release day but shortly thereafter.
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I admit I expected a little more from Lion and think ML is Lion done right, but I'm happy they released Lion instead of waiting a year for ML, that is, I'm glad they didn't stall Lion until done right. It was better than SL despite the kinks and disappointments. The total costs for the Lion bundle is 50$, and it does represent, so far as I can tell, a huge leap forward over SL. Compare the price for the bundle to Windows, and compare the finished product, ML, to what Windows has to offer, and I think Apple is still the far more desirable of the two. But that's just me take (ps I hope we can disable Facebook and twitter system wide, don't wanna see that junk in my OS, but I doubt it'll be possible).
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Useful: Something I would use. I can also see that you've never programmed before, because if you did, you would realize that sometimes older API's are implemented in a way that makes them more useful than a newer one, even if they functionally do the same thing.
For example, there's an API in Leopard that allows me to run Diablo II. You can argue all day about how rosetta works, but the fact of the matter is the .app calls an API that leads to Diablo II running. That API was in fact a wrapper for a translator for some PPC code. It's rather slow, and a different, native intel version is faster. But it won't work for Diablo II. The older API is more useful, as it allows my game to run. The new, different one, doesn't.
What exactly did they do on Lion that made it a better OS than SL. Most people I think would agree that SL is the better, faster, lighter-weight OS, while Lion is a turd with shiney polish.
The fact is, I'd rather use a 1.2" thick Dell over my 2011, 13" Macbook Air, because my Dell runs Windows 7 faster than my air runs lion. And not only that, but it runs programs that my air can only dream of running, like Diablo II.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft unvieled the Surface and Surface Pro. There's a demo floating around of the Surface Pro running an application, natively, from the 80's. Not only can Apple not beat that, they don't even run programs from 2006!
I'm running OSX 10.8 DP 4:
SMB --- Not the fault of Apple, they were forced to remove samba in lion... blame microsoft as Apple have to reverse engineer a closed source protocol adding salt to the wound is that Microsoft removed AFP support in Windows 2008.
SMBX is way buggy in ML, it's faster! copying from a Windows 2008 R2 box to my laptop over gigabit ethernet i'm getting ~ 47MB/s consistent!
Finder integration... meh, every time I click the server name in the sidebar it just brings up a share called '/' so i either have to goto the /Volumes folder or just manually mount the share again, but that happens on 1 of my servers, the other 2 are fine (so it might be a weird Windows bug as well, don't know). And it doesn't seem to be available to other app's either still.
SMB --- Not the fault of Apple, they were forced to remove samba in lion... blame microsoft as Apple have to reverse engineer a closed source protocol adding salt to the wound is that Microsoft removed AFP support in Windows 2008.
SMBX is way buggy in ML, it's faster! copying from a Windows 2008 R2 box to my laptop over gigabit ethernet i'm getting ~ 47MB/s consistent!
Finder integration... meh, every time I click the server name in the sidebar it just brings up a share called '/' so i either have to goto the /Volumes folder or just manually mount the share again, but that happens on 1 of my servers, the other 2 are fine (so it might be a weird Windows bug as well, don't know). And it doesn't seem to be available to other app's either still.
Solaris. It basically runs most of the world's banking institutions, for instance.
Again, Sun does this better than Microsoft. That you don't know them does not change that.
If you aren't aware of the technical details, perhaps you are not qualified to make most of these statements.
Anyway, they are not specified to be stable because they are not specified at all. These things tend to be for internal use by Apple, at least until they figure out what it is they want and how to make a public API out of it. APIs for internal use by Apple can change without notice if Apple needs something changed. Of course, all Apple's applications will be updated to reflect that change in the same update that changes the API.
As for games: they run into exactly this problem. Many are ports from Windows or otherwise multiplatform and to get something going they use these private APIs, or they use them for some performance reason. I haven't myself seen any fully mac-native games break with an OS upgrade. In fact, I regularly play Quake3 and it runs fantastically on Lion. And this is a game that originally ran on Mac OS 9.
Sun has a very narrow clientele with specific needs, backwards compatibility is much more doable than what ms has been trying to do. You don't want to commend them on that, fine, that doesn't mean they don't deserve it.
I try to comment to the extent that I am aware of the technical details. From your description I gather that it's not the developers fault if apple doesn't specify the apis and they have to use something.
Ok, you're right, I apologize. They're whiners, not "sniveling whiners".
Snow Leopard is a GREAT operating system. I may even downgrade to it. It's performance and stability may be the pinnacle of OS X. I feel that Lion added a bunch of tablet-like UI features which serve no benefit. If Snow Leopard had serious performance or reliability problems, and the long-awaited upgrade broke things, then whine away!
HOWEVER, Apple sells the upgrade for only $30 and their backup/restore system is flawless, so if you don't like Lion, don't use it. Big deal. It isn't a conspiracy to ruin your life. You knew it didn't have Rosetta before you upgraded. Why did Apple remove Rosetta? My guess is they wanted to force app developers to write faster apps. Another possibility is to prepare the OS for portability to another CPU, or to make porting between iOS and MacOS simpler. It could be something they're looking at 2-3 years out. Or maybe the QA effort was too great. I don't know.
Back in the days of Newton, Apple had a real dog on their hands, and they continually upgraded the OS to "improve handwriting recognition" and it still never worked well at anything. They even had one upgrade that involved mailing the Newton back to Apple for $100, and it still didn't work well. Now, THAT was worthy of a good whine. In fact, it was worthy of sacking the CEO, which is exactly what happened.
That depends. Sometimes to achieve some kind of functionality, they have to hook into something of Apple's that isn't public. And then when Apple changes that, their app breaks. Sometimes it isn't necessary at all, but they still do it. The why of that is never constant.
Also, they may be using published APIs but using them wrongly. For instance, not initialising something correctly. Then a change that does not affect well-written applications may break apps that aren't.
Or they may be relying on a bug: some API is published to work a certain way, but under the right circumstances does something else. The bug is fixed, the app breaks.
There are many reasons for this sort of thing to happen. Some are Apple's fault, though they tend to be mindful of changes to published APIs, some are the developer's fault.
In any case: if Apple has not published an API for public use they cannot be faulted for changing it. Most of the time these APIs are private for a while, during which they change a lot, and then at some point they've figured out how it should work and then they make the API public.
Back then technology was much buggier than it is today, now it's come to it's own to the extent where a run of the mill far east small factory can put together a tablet, slap android on top and be relatively bug free.
Nowadays the issues to "whine" about are more nuanced:
lack of upgradeability
forced obsolescence
Lack of support for applications and broken compatibilities.
And apple isn't what it was back then, apple can afford to be doing much, much better because they are sitting on a pile of a cash pretty much no one in the tech world has seen before. They don't have excuses for sitting on hfs+ for so long, they don't have excuses for not optimizing their os and slapping on one poorly developed commercial or flashy "feature" on top of the other. They can't address glaring bugs such as smb bugs, security bugs, etc. etc. with the same speed they did 5, or 10 years ago. People pay up margins that are unthought of in the industry at 40 and 50% they should demonstrate consistent excellence to warrant such prices. But they simply don't. They are cruising easily on hype and then they go and "update" the mac pro with 2 year old cpu and gfx, no usb3 or thunderbolt (in 2012...) and an upwards of 60% margin. I think that's pissing upon their user base, it's not development.
Unix has been stable for decades; since before DOS and the Apple II. Microsoft would have become a much more stable OS long ago if they'd forsaken compatibility.
But if what you're suggesting were so easy to do, Linux would be on all the desktops.
Why linux isn't on all desktops is a very, very long discussion btw...
Agreed in part. Windows is also supposed to run though on every imaginable x86 configuration on the globe, which isn't at all an easy fit. Apple have it very easy that they only need support a very small subset of configurations. Problem is they want to make this subset even smaller. There really is no reason why core duos should not be supported anymore, let alone mac pros from a few years ago. It's not as if lion or ml are bringing about such cutting edge features that render some older macs incapable of handling them.
Even the crap gfx cards that apple opted for back then can very well handle the lions, if a bunch of animations for a launcher and versions (the most convoluted undo system ever created, lol, as someone correctly said ) is going to tax them apple can very well turn these features off for them. They do this anyway with ios which only has selective features per device on an update. Why not doing it with os x too? We heard about this fancy marketing idea of cross pollination of the two os's... where is it then the ios strategy of allowing older devices to upgrade but with a subset of features? Is the cross pollination limited to per design crashes of text edit (a "feature": freezing the app), inexplicable ical and contacts interfaces for touch screens on macs, and saving documents when you don't want them to be saved?
Agreed in part. Windows is also supposed to run though on every imaginable x86 configuration on the globe, which isn't at all an easy fit. Apple have it very easy that they only need support a very small subset of configurations. Problem is they want to make this subset even smaller. There really is no reason why core duos should not be supported anymore, let alone mac pros from a few years ago. It's not as if lion or ml are bringing about such cutting edge features that render some older macs incapable of handling them.
Even the crap gfx cards that apple opted for back then can very well handle the lions, if a bunch of animations for a launcher and versions (the most convoluted undo system ever created, lol, as someone correctly said ) is going to tax them apple can very well turn these features off for them. They do this anyway with ios which only has selective features per device on an update. Why not doing it with os x too?
We heard about this fancy marketing idea of cross pollination of the two os's... where is it then the ios strategy of allowing older devices to upgrade but with a subset of features? Is the cross pollination limited to per design crashes of text edit (a "feature": freezing the app), inexplicable ical and contacts interfaces for touch screens on macs, and saving documents when you don't want them to be saved?