isgoed said:
This is not about apple porting its i-apps to windows. It is about attracting more 3rd pary developers to take on the battle with the windows environment. And in this battle developers are your soldiers.
Do you really think it would take very long for Address Book, Dictionary, Font Book, the Finder, iCal, iChat, or even iPhoto (minus web services) to be rewritten, open source, for Windows? I don't. Hell, people have already redone the Finder on OS X.
iApps will remain OSX only.
Apple won't release them, but someone else will make a "good enough" rip off.
and you can make programs that integrate quicktime also on windows.
Through unsupported hacks that ultimately script QuickTime Player. You can't write a movie editing app using the QuickTime APIs on the Windows side like you can on the Mac side.
(why do you think they called it Safari?)
I figured it was from Steve listening to the Beach Boys (let's go surfin' now, everybody's learning how, come on and Safari with me! I think the ending music for that keynote was even that song.
Would it be unthinkable for Apple to create some kind of Carbon-to-Cocoa converter in xCode?
Speaking as a developer, I can definitively say, YES, this is unthinkable. Moreover, it is impossible.
Or include Carbon support in the Windows Yellowbox environment?
This is what was known as "Red Box for Windows": Carbon on Windows. Only enough of Carbon was ported for QuickTime Player, and iTunes. Red Box for Windows was never a real product, and I doubt that a secret Red Box for Windows dev team exists, though I have no doubt that a Yellow Box for Windows team does.
Incidentally, there was also "Blue Box", which became the Classic environment in OS X (even less likely to have a dev team for windows), hence the process name of Tru(e)BlueEnv(ironment).
GeeYouEye is right, up to a point... That point is this: If Apple thinks it can keep making money as a boutique hardware supplier, they're dead. PC hardware has become a commodity, and any company betting otherwise, except for specialized applications, will not see the end of the decade.
Actually, I think you missed my point entirely. My point was that no, Apple can't sell computers on hardware alone, but they can't become a software company because 1. They'd be competing with Microsoft AND OSS, 2. software can and will be pirated, and 3. software is much harder to design without knowledge of the hardware, lowering margins.
As GeeYouEye rightly points out, operating system software, and much application software, is becoming a commodity also. That's why making Cocoa cross-platform is an amazingly perceptive thing to do - and if Apple isn't doing it, someone else should. It will be possible to have "that which is a Mac" running on a variety of operating systems, by having an "application platform" above the OS.
No, it's not. OSS as a concept is PERFECTLY tailored to operating systems because they all do exactly the same functiond. Linux, for the most part, rocks. Darwin mostly rocks. Whereas by comparison, the classic Mac OS and WinNT blow. But (and I know this is going to upset people) KDE and Qt suck! Tcl/Tk sucks! Gnome and GTK suck slightly less! OpenOffice is still not on par with MS office. The only reason Firefox and Safari are considered as good as they are is because IE has stagnated since MS made it free to kill Netscape. Look at OmniWeb or Opera to see what kinds of great innovations a competitive browser market can make. Quartz and the forthcoming WGF make X11 look like ancient history. The Cocoa frameworks, with all their bridges (Ruby, Java, Python, etc.), leaves everything but .NET (I'd say not even the STL, but I hate C++, so I'm biased against it, so I'll leave it in) and to a lesser extent GNUStep in the dust. You won't find Spotlight on Linux. There is no better inter-app scripting system than AppleScript with Automator (for GUI's. The pipe works just fine in the CLI, of course, but even that can only deal with strings. And parts of Monad are going to absolutely blow that out of the water. Apple really should come up with competition, though they may be relying on AppleScript and osascript on the CLI). Don't even get me started on CoreImage/Video/Audio/Data/MIDI, ColorSync, or EOF/WOF. These are things that are Mac only, and proprietary. And they're what get people to buy the overpriced hardware; the kickass software doesn't run anywhere else (which is why Apple
must use TPM, much as I hate it, or a non-x86 chipset, as they have for the past 20+ years).
This is why Yellow Box/Windows is a terrible idea, though not completely suicidal; if Apple were to bring in Cocoa as-is, without any conversion to using Win32 for display, for example, it would require quite possibly the greatest of the crown jewels, Apple's Hope Diamond if you will, Quartz. Similarly it would bring in AppleScript (NSASKit) (though not Automator, it wouldn't take forever for someone to write a Windows version of that), CoreData(!!), CoreImage, and ColorSync (these last used by NSImage). With Mac-like applications suddenly running beautifully on Windows, what incentive will anyone have to get a Macintosh? iLife (okay, using that in my previous post was a bad example)? Maybe. But iPhoto could be rewritten easily enough, and iTunes is already there. Garageband wouldn't be impossible either, though it would likely have to use WMA for the engine. Terrible for Apple. But they won't do that. They'll convert the AppKit implementation to Win32/Windows.Forms, which will eliminate all the other technologies they'd have to bring in. Still, losing control of one valuable technology can't be good for the company.
A question, though: How will Apple make any money in such a brave new world? By selling iPods, or developer support? It hardly seems likely. They will have to charge for something that they're currently giving away, I should think.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner! I think you're starting to see here just how difficult it would be for Apple to do this. You're right: iPods and DTS (and iLife and iWork and Pro Apps) are simply not enough to make the company nearly as profitable as it is now. Leveraging software, specifically mostly Application Technologies (even if they call it part of the OS, it's not), to sell hardware is a sustainable business model (and trying to make itself dominant in the OSS world with Darwin can't hurt, even if there's little innovation there). And it's one Apple is going to stick with, because Apple can do Application Technologies better than anyone*.
On WINE: WINE is the only thing I can think of that would cause Apple to release Yellow Box/Windows. If they feel the threat of the OS/2 effect is great enough, they might release YB/W specifically to make WINE irrelevant, because the binaries will be universal and the apps will look and feel like Mac apps when running on OS X. But this by no means guarantees anything. Adobe, Macromedia, and Microsoft all have way too much invested in legacy code to even think about porting to YB/W, especially if it doesn't include the niceties of Quartz, CoreImage, etc., which would be financially impossible for Apple to allow, as shown above. So what does Apple gain by YB/W? A dilution, not even a decrease, in the number of WINE-run apps. Only if the OS/2 effect ends up great enough (and I think Apple will wait and see if this is the case before deciding one way or the other) does it make any sense at all.
*No, Apple cannot just sell Application Technologies. People don't like to buy AT (unless they're consultants). They won't buy expensive frameworks unless they get something real (hardware) with them. Case in point: WebObjects, which once cost $50,000, dropped to $699, and then free for development (and a deployment license comes with OS X Server). Consultants LOVED WebObjects when it was $50k, because it meant large, expensive contracts. But consultants and contractors came to make up too small a market compared to full-time hired developers, whose budgets were too small for that.
