1. All of the computers below those price range you mentioned are going to be horribly crippled with the stock ram they have included.
2. What about all of those computers that were sold before the standardization of 512mb in Desktops/Notebooks if they are not fully able to utilize the stock features in Vista, i think they may be just a little pissed
3. All those people buying those extremely cheap comps without the stock 512mb ram do we really think they are going to be the type of people capable to install ram on their own??
That's why there are four tiers to their UI.
http://activewin.com/longhorn/images/Longhorn Graphics Experiences 1.png
The Classic tier will run on anything that can run Windows 2000/XP.
I'm still confident, however, that Leopard will provide another great leap. I also don't believe for a second that Vista will be in any way a Tiger OR Leopard killer--I just don't see MS pulling off something this big on the first try.
I'm doubting how big a leap Leopard will be. I think Apple needs to worry more about their Intel switchover rather than beating Microsoft. I saw how slow Photoshop CS2 loaded on the 3.6ghz P4 and I'm quite worried. Apple seems to throw performance considerations to the wind sometimes and I hope they don't do that here. Tiger was/is way too buggy IMO. I don't want the same from Leopard.
Even so, I don't believe Tiger was the leap over Panther than Panther was over Jag or Jag over 10.1. IMO it's the smallest OS X update yet.
Maybe Macworld 2006 or WWDC 2006 will change my mind.
I don't have any doubts about Microsoft's ability to pull of Longhorn because I've been using the bits the entire time. I've used all the Windows Server 2003 bits (beta and retail), all the Longhorn builds, all the Avalon and Indigo builds, and all the XP x64 builds. I'm also running Tablet and Media Center Edition at home. Windows Server 2003 was one of the best OS releases ever. It was extremely stable, very very fast, and solid all around. If Longhorn launches as well as all the individual pieces look then it'll be great.
From what I understand, I've seen or read about 50% or more of Longhorn's feature set. The list is extremely long at this point. There's a lot of things in Longhorn and they've fixed a lot of things people had problems with in XP. I don't see very much innovation in Tiger (automator is cool though) so I don't see how Longhorn
can't beat it. Longhorn Beta 1 looks like it will put Tiger to shame.
Their whole corporate mindset is very twisted and they only superficially try to provide what customers want. At the same time, they try to rip off the customer by locking them into proprietary formats, saddling them with privacy-violating software, and pushing huge new updates on them all the time.
See I feel that way about Apple. They don't give customers what they actually want in favor of looking innovative. They'd rather be first with a niche technology like Firewire 800 (to be precieved as innovative) than ship their machines with 512mbs of ram standard. They were one of, if not, the first to implement DVD burners when they were a $800-$1000 option but they were the last to implement dual layer DVD burning, DVD+ support, 8X and 16X burning when those advancements were cheap. Their lack of high-res laptop LCD's is pushed aside so they can offer a 30 inch Cinema Screen-- their laptop screens still suck compared to the ones found on mid-range Dells, HP's, IBM's, and Fujitsu's. They rushed Spotlight out the door to beat Longhorn (it got beat by MSDS/WDS anyway) and all it did was hurt Mac users. It's absolutely ridiculous that the Finder can't use the new metadata for sorting, grouping, etc. or that you can't apply keywords to multiple files without Automator. Why can't Spotlight index a database when MSDS, Indexing Service, GoogleDS, YahooDS, X1, Lookout, Beagle, and numerous other desktop search apps can. Why doesn't Spotlight return the context of an item? Where's the item preview? Why isn't all this new metadata editable via the Finder? The demo sure looked good though.
At the same time, they try to rip off the customer by locking them into proprietary formats,
Likewise, Apple disables WMA playback on the iPod when it supports it by default. The iTMS-iPod lock-in is a perfect example.
pushing huge new updates on them all the time.
Microsoft keeps a ton of backwards compatibilty in their releases. Even in Longhorn you can revert all the way back to the Windows 2000 interface (even in the final version of Longhorn). It fully supports Win32 and most other legacy APIs. Apple ditched OS 9 in such a way as to make it painful for most of us and now only five years later they're making another huge switch that is going to require me to buy lots of new software. They break tons of programs with every release and they don't port much of anything back to the previous OS. Did you know that brand new iMacs won't boot into Panther?
It seems to me that Apple is more "Microsoftish" than Microsoft is these days. Case in point: Microsoft went to Dave Winer and the RSS community to get feedback on their RSS extenstions, then released it via Creative Commons while Apple took RSS and did a true "embrace and extend" with iTunes 4.9. Apple is the one now practicing lock-in with their Fairplay while Microsoft choose to not even control the licensing of WM9 directly. It's only availble via thrid-parties and it's available to anyone on any OS. Numerous Linux devices now support WM9 with full DRM support. Microsoft is releasing the specs to the new Office and Metro file formats. You can license them for free and now compatibilty should be very easy for competitors.
Now Apple is using Palladium on their Mactels for the exact doomsday scenario that people tried to accuse Microsoft of.
