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Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

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Re: Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

#161

Post by davidw »

pg wrote: post #156
mattmaroon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think that Apple wouldn't have ruthlessly exploited the monopoly if they had come about it? Their actions with iPod/iPhone make me think they would have. Jobs is just as much the ruthless dictator as Gates. In fact from what I've read/heard from people that know them, they seem to share a lot of the same personality traits.

Not as ruthlessly, I don't think. Not because Jobs is a nicer guy than Gates, but because he has taste. He could not bring himself to ship a crappy product. And so wherever shipping something great didn't coincide with exploiting the monopoly, he would not have been able to go so far down the latter vector. Also, shipping great stuff requires you to have great hackers to build it, and great hackers have principles. T…

I'm not particularly convinced of Apple's good will.

Speaking of the 80ies, Apple is the one that wanted to control both the OS and the hardware (still true today, from phones to computers), and Apple is the one that sued MS over 'look & feel' issues.

Re: Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

#162

Post by pg »

davidw wrote: post #161
pg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as ruthlessly, I don't think. Not because Jobs is a nicer guy than Gates, but because he has taste. He could not bring himself to ship a crappy product. And so wherever shipping something great didn't coincide with exploiting the monopoly, he would not have been able to go so far down the latter vector. Also, shipping great stuff requires you to have great hackers to build it, and great hackers have principles. T…

I'm not particularly convinced of Apple's good will. Speaking of the 80ies, Apple is the one that wanted to control both the OS and the hardware (still true today, from phones to computers), and Apple is the one that sued MS over 'look & feel' issues.

Back in the 80s it would have seemed bizarre to do otherwise. You used whatever OS the manufacturer supplied. It was part of the computer. That was as true with Microsoft OSes.

Apple choosing to make their own OSes instead of buy them from an outsider supplier was in those days no different from e.g. building displays or keyboards rather than buying them from suppliers.

Re: Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

#163

Post by unalone »

krschultz wrote: post #141
briansmith wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu is not more polished than even Windows XP. The main things keeping me from switching my day-to-day work to my Ubuntu partition are (1) text rendering, (2) reliability, (3) battery life, and (4) Lenovo's Thinkvantage tools. Windows XP absolutely kills Ubuntu in these aspects.

1) That has changed recently with the addition of the Liberation fonts, but I agree - a few months back it was a hack 2) What? I don't think many people will agree with you on that aspect. The fact that most Linux crashes you can just reset X and be back at the login screen, where as a Windows crash needs a full reboot means that even if Linux did crash more often - which I don't think it does - you spend less time g…

1) What are the Liberation fonts? I'm curious.

2) There are still reliability problems. I'd include driver issues as a reliability problem.

Re: Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

#164

Post by unalone »

utx00 wrote: post #159
unalone wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I've played with Ubuntu in each iteration, and its level of polish is on a magnitude below what Apple's doing. Compared to Windows, it's very nice: I'd pick Ubuntu over Vista at this point without hesitation. But OS X has polish to a level that's uncanny: it's the sort where I'm still finding out new things about my computer that make my life slightly easier every day. It's really beyond comparison to other opera…

i disagree. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131547

You make some good points. However, I haven't noticed a lot of what you've said.

The keyboard on the newer computers is beautiful. I didn't like the old big keyboard: the new ones feel wonderfully responsive to me. The heat is a problem, but I guess I'm biased, because I rarely have my computer on my lap. I keep it on my desk or in my bed. And I use a fan program to speed up my fans when I need to, and it usually works.

The proprietary formats are a pain, yes, but that doesn't affect me very often. With iTunes, I get most of my music from other sources. I have perhaps 10 CDs that I got from iTunes, and that's mostly from Plus, so it's open enough to send to other people. Everything else is MP3 and MP4, which means - among other things - I can click and drag songs to iChat and it works.

The mail import took me a long time, for Gmail. But it imported my other emails first, and with Gmail it imported mostly the archived email, so I could use it right out of the box. I don't use Maildir, so mail works pretty much beautifully for me.

What does that optimization do for the fonts? Do you have an example? And either way, I'd take the Apple default fonts over anything else I've seen to date. I'd kill to keep Zapfino.

Re: Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

#165

Post by utx00 »

unalone wrote: post #164
utx00 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i disagree. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131547

You make some good points. However, I haven't noticed a lot of what you've said. The keyboard on the newer computers is beautiful. I didn't like the old big keyboard: the new ones feel wonderfully responsive to me. The heat is a problem, but I guess I'm biased, because I rarely have my computer on my lap. I keep it on my desk or in my bed. And I use a fan program to speed up my fans when I need to, and it usually wor…

i find apple fonts too fuzzy. i kept my powerbook for almost a year before i gave up. see this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/12.html (it's a 5 min read)

the optimization just gives you really nice smoothing (i wish i could upload pictures here). i currently use the android font on emacs 23 on a thinkpad (black on light blue) and i find it to be much easier on the eyes (the powerbook fuzziness gave me headaches)

anyhoo, enjoy. the hardware is indeed beautiful. and the new aluminum ones sure are tempting (but i'll wait until someone gets ubuntu working properly on them)

and not to beat a dead horse, i really tried _hard_ to get the powerbook to work for me. i was really determined to like it. but no dice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131930

Re: Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

#166

Post by mattmaroon »

pg wrote: post #156
mattmaroon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think that Apple wouldn't have ruthlessly exploited the monopoly if they had come about it? Their actions with iPod/iPhone make me think they would have. Jobs is just as much the ruthless dictator as Gates. In fact from what I've read/heard from people that know them, they seem to share a lot of the same personality traits.

Not as ruthlessly, I don't think. Not because Jobs is a nicer guy than Gates, but because he has taste. He could not bring himself to ship a crappy product. And so wherever shipping something great didn't coincide with exploiting the monopoly, he would not have been able to go so far down the latter vector. Also, shipping great stuff requires you to have great hackers to build it, and great hackers have principles. T…

You mean "great" from a design/usability perspective. Gates shipped products that were great in terms of fitting market need and expanding the utility of Windows. IE may have sucked to use, but it sure beat the hell out of paying for Netscape.

Re: Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

#167

Post by jimbokun »

pg wrote: post #156
mattmaroon wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think that Apple wouldn't have ruthlessly exploited the monopoly if they had come about it? Their actions with iPod/iPhone make me think they would have. Jobs is just as much the ruthless dictator as Gates. In fact from what I've read/heard from people that know them, they seem to share a lot of the same personality traits.

Not as ruthlessly, I don't think. Not because Jobs is a nicer guy than Gates, but because he has taste. He could not bring himself to ship a crappy product. And so wherever shipping something great didn't coincide with exploiting the monopoly, he would not have been able to go so far down the latter vector. Also, shipping great stuff requires you to have great hackers to build it, and great hackers have principles. T…

"He could not bring himself to ship a crappy product."

Interesting to see this quote from Jobs during today's Apple earnings call:

"We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve. And there's a lot of them."

Almost like he knew we were having this conversation. :)

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