Quote :

"You f00ls are NOT EVEN CONSIDERING the importance of MS Office for Macs before typing inane BS like ^ above who compares a service oriented server software company like RedHat to a predominantly desktop oriented company like Apple. MS Office for Macs isn't Microsoft's fav product...it isn't even technically under any contract/negotiation to keep up the development. If Apple introduces a direct competitor to Windows, MS stops developing Office for Mac, and yes, no one wants to buy OSX."

I actually absolutely agree. IF Microsoft pulled Office for the Mac, it would be a HUGE hurdle to cross.

Quote :

"Ofcourse, I am sure in his next post, Noen is gonna talk about Apple's own productivity suite or OpenOffice...but dude...Office for Mac is one of the most used applications on it."

OpenOffice isn't ready for the bigtime, but it's certainly a viable replacement for home users. But as with the above, yes it would absolutely fuck up OSX sales for Office to be pulled.

Quote :

"Also, Dell sells PCs with no Windows installed, and I am sure you believe that they are all top notch high end systems with the latest hardware technology...not to mention that they are really sold in huge numbers."

Top notch, yes. Latest tech, depends completely on what you want, but is the latest and greatest available? Absolutely. Sold in large numbers? Definitely not, but that's my point.

If they only manage to entice .5% of PC buyers, thats still reaching more users than the entire userbase of Apple computer's now.

8/19/2005 2:02:50 AM

Quote :

"Guess what? Redhat has the same issues. And they are a damn profitable business. The junkies who want the thing to run on their custom hardware will make it do so."

You'd have a point here if it weren't for the fact that the majority of OS X users aren't 'computer junkies.' They're the kind of people that hang out on the CHASS campus, the type that have trouble getting their e-mail to work. If the OS doesn't work well or isn't reliable, these people wouldn't buy it.

Quote :

"It's called BSD, aka the core of OSX. You take the EXISTING DRIVERS for BSD, port them and whalah. And you dont have to support EVERY DEVICE, Windows ONLY does it because it's required to by law (government legacy contracts). They dont have to write shit. All they have to support are the configurations of the OEMs they provide to. For DELL (which has a stranglehold on the consumer desktop market), they have to support 3 chipsets, a handful of videocards that they ALREADY support, and three or four audio solutions. It's not in ANY way expensive or intensive."

Microsoft doesn't support much of anything, really. It's the hardware developers themselves who end up writing the drivers for Windows. They'd have no incentive to spend the effort and money to write OS X-based drivers until a large percentage of PC users began using OS X. Hence, it's a Catch-22 situation... Dell only has to support their own hardware because they know what goes into their computers, but this is not the case for the entire PC industry. There are thousands of different pieces of hardware for the PC, and without knowing exactly what hardware will be going into a computer, you won't be able to tell whether the machine would run OS X reliably or not.

Quote :

"1) Apple II/IIe made them loot. They followed up with trash and almost bankrupted the company 2) The Macintosh was amazing, it made the company profitable again, until they saturated the market. They hit the plateau because, like today, you can only sell so many units at a cost significantly above that of the competition. Once Macintosh plateaued, they went south again 3) PowerMac and the G3 save the company again, finally they were more powerful than the PC counterpart and could do specialized worthwhile tasks. Then they rode the hell out of it with the G4 and G5, imac and emac's 4) Ipod"

The Apple III was a piece of crap, but, make no mistake, the machines that came after were not. The Lisa (I own one of these) and the original Macintosh were both highly innovative machines, but like all Apple products of the time, they were too damned expensive to be sold to home users, where their true market was. Jef Raskin originally wanted the Mac to sell for 500 bucks, but Apple still had these delusions of being a 'business company' and taking IBM to task in the business market. For this reason, the Lisa and the Mac bombed quite a bit, as the people who would've been interested in buying one instead bought a much more affordable Commodore or a TRS-80. You're right that after the initial burst of Mac popularity, sales slumped and the company began hemorrhaging money.

The reason why Apple's moving to an x86-based platform is because they want to make their system cheaper for the home and artistic users who buy their systems. If the Mac becomes cheaper to produce and they can keep the profit margin for the systems the same, they'll likely sell more and thereby make more money.

The truth is, Apple's always made its money from hardware, and once the iPod popularity dies down, they'll need to think up something new and innovative. However, this is the natural way of things at Apple, and you can be assured that they'll do it again with something new if they need to. Until then, they've wisely chosen to avoid wasting the money on something which would end up losing them money and making valuable business partners (like Microsoft) angry at them.

In closing, I'd bet you 100,000 dollars that we won't see Apple release a vanilla x86-based OS X by 2010. It's a safer bet than going all-in on a royal flush in poker.

8/19/2005 11:26:50 AM

Quote :

"You'd have a point here if it weren't for the fact that the majority of OS X users aren't 'computer junkies.' They're the kind of people that hang out on the CHASS campus, the type that have trouble getting their e-mail to work. If the OS doesn't work well or isn't reliable, these people wouldn't buy it. "

Fact is, damn near every linux junky I know would go to OSX if they could. That's a small, but VERY good market to capture. Because THOSE are the guys who write drivers, addons, programs and everything else that has kept linux alive.

And OSX works well.

Quote :

"Microsoft doesn't support much of anything, really. It's the hardware developers themselves who end up writing the drivers for Windows. They'd have no incentive to spend the effort and money to write OS X-based drivers until a large percentage of PC users began using OS X. Hence, it's a Catch-22 situation... Dell only has to support their own hardware because they know what goes into their computers, but this is not the case for the entire PC industry. There are thousands of different pieces of hardware for the PC, and without knowing exactly what hardware will be going into a computer, you won't be able to tell whether the machine would run OS X reliably or not. "

Wrong again my friend. Microsoft supports a shit ton of stuff. NOW they don't end up writing many/any driver sets, but they have the WHQL process which is pretty rediculous but this is all very recent history.

And every major piece of hardware that can be used for something on a mac, has mac drivers. Printers and input peripherals have been supported, in general, for a long time.

And once again you are making a fucking retarded ass argument.

In the past 2 years I can cover 90% of the hardware market:

Intel i865,i810,i875,i915,i925,i855 (9xx already supported)
AMD nforce, nforce2, nforce3, nforce4
VIA ktX00

Intel i810e, i9xx, i3xx graphics (9xx already supported)
nVidia geforce2,3,mx,fx (already all supported btw)
ATI radeon (already supported)
Realtek, Marvell, Broadcom ethernet (Realtek already supported)
Realtek AC audio,
Creative Labs Audigy and Soundblaster (already supported)
nVidia soundstorm

That's really it man. They make their own wireless solution, and the average user need video, sound and ethernet. Printers are largely already supported.

And of the above of those mentioned, MOST already have stable BSD drivers.

Thousands of pieces of hardware THESE days, are mostly using universal driver sets.

Quote :

"The reason why Apple's moving to an x86-based platform is because they want to make their system cheaper for the home and artistic users who buy their systems. If the Mac becomes cheaper to produce and they can keep the profit margin for the systems the same, they'll likely sell more and thereby make more money."

They are moving because Intel has forward mobility and gave them a better deal than IBM could or did. They have NO intention of dropping prices by any significant amount. As always their hardware is horribly low margin and since they cant move a million machines a week like dell, they have to keep those prices jacked to stay in business.

Quote :

"The truth is, Apple's always made its money from hardware, and once the iPod popularity dies down, they'll need to think up something new and innovative. However, this is the natural way of things at Apple, and you can be assured that they'll do it again with something new if they need to. "

The argument of "this is how its always been done, so this is how to do it" is fucking STUPID. Apple has never made money. They've teetered on bankrupcy several times. It's obviously not working out so well over the time.

Quote :

"In closing, I'd bet you 100,000 dollars that we won't see Apple release a vanilla x86-based OS X by 2010. It's a safer bet than going all-in on a royal flush in poker."

You got it man.

8/19/2005 12:47:08 PM

http://www.avaelliotsasser.com/videos/OSx86vsOSX.wmv

8/23/2005 1:35:01 AM

8/23/2005 5:23:38 PM

http://www.qfile.de/dl/181586/Maxxuss-SSE3to2-AllInclusive-v0.2.zip.html

Patches all SSE3 to SSE2 for non-qualifying cpu's. Guess I was wrong, instead of a month, it took two days.

8/24/2005 2:18:42 AM

and ^^^ thanks gargs. Amazing how a hacked developer beta is faster than the native powerbook TI huh?

8/24/2005 2:20:41 AM

lol that was a good video from gargs

8/24/2005 9:18:36 AM

got it running on the shuttle sn95g5. even without sound, video or ethernet support it ran quick and looked great. probably come back to it once people get the nforce drivers ported from freebsd.

8/25/2005 12:51:58 PM

^^^yup, cuz a tower is slower than a laptop.

8/25/2005 4:57:40 PM

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0509builds.html

The latest version of OS X86 seems to block the hacking methods currently used.

9/13/2005 1:05:09 AM